The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, Debtember 05, 2019

Nothing to see here, citizen … move along

So The Ft. Lauderdale Office of the Corporation is having a holiday lunch tomorrow. I'm checking the email that was sent announcing it to get the address, when I notice the link to the restaurant's website. Curious, I click on the link only to get:

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to serabythewater.com. PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR

The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Learn more…

Report errors like this to help Mozilla identify and block malicious sites

And no option to ignore the error and view the site anyway. So I decide to try loading the non-secure version of the restaurant's website and got:

Web Page Blocked

Access to the web page you were trying to visit has been blocked in accordance with company policy. Please contact your system administrator if you believe this is in error.

User: XXXXX­XXXXX­XXX

URL: XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXXX­XXXX

Category: malware

Oh … really?

And in apparent unrelated news, it appears we are no longer capable of logging into Linked­My­Face­Me­Space­Book­We­In from The Ft. Lauderdale Office of the Corporation. I have to wonder if the network changes last week have anything to do with this …

Attack of the feed fetchers

A question about my JSON feed prompted me to look a bit closer at the requests being made.

JSON feed requests per user agent
requests agent
3723 Ruby
306 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; inoreader.com; 1 subscribers)
14 The Knowledge AI
12 Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SeznamBot/3.2-test1; +http://napoveda.seznam.cz/en/seznambot-intro/)
10 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)

That “Ruby” agent is not only requesting the feed every 10 minutes, but doing so from the same IP address. It's excessive and it inflates the apparent popularity of the JSON feed, but it's not enough to get me to ban it, although it doesn't need to be quite so aggressive.

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No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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